Posts Tagged ‘book’

Cartooning- specifically comic strips- has taken an odd turn over the past couple of decades. The decline of the newspapers as the #1 source of information for most Americans has a lot to do with it. Way back (not THAT far back) when every major city in America had at least two newspapers, the value of any single comic strip or writer’s column could be measured in dollars gained or lost when a newspaper quit publishing it or started publishing it. If one paper quit publishing Doonesbury, for instance, and it’s sales and subscriptions declined while the other local paper picked up Doonesbury and its sales increased, then you could say that Doonesbury had a particular instantly provable value to a newspaper.

These days, not so much.

A writer I work with is also an auditor of newspaper circulation. Circulation (sales of newspapers, eyes available to advertisers in that newspaper) is how the newspapers set their advertising rates. Subscriptions and sales don’t generate a newspaper’s main income stream- it sets the scale for the newspaper to generate it’s main income stream… advertising. The newspapers are really good at inflating their circulation numbers in lots of ways, so they can charge more for the ads they run and therefore stay in business.

But I mentioned the decline of the papers, right? There’s that whole supply-and-demand thing. If advertisers are now running off to other venues, then the newspapers have to either drop their ad rates no matter what their circulation numbers are, or create a new value to advertising within their pages.

I hear from a lot of people (editorial cartoonists, newspaper illustrators, random newspaper employees, and circulation auditors) that the average newspaper’s decision makers are unwilling to make their jobs any more complicated by doing things that might attract readers. In other words, they’ve already given up. Sometimes, it’s even a matter of not backing up to a pre-automated method of doing things that’s the hang-up. Specifically, the idea that newspapers might draw in just the sort of interested reader they want to/need to by using webcomics on their comics page- hip, attention-grabbing, high-traffic comics used cheaply because it’s just another revenue stream to THOSE cartoonists- not the be-all, end-all of their income like for syndicated cartoons. The editor of the comics page of the paper I’m talking about said that it wouldn’t work because they now use a computer program that automatically drops in the daily comic strips and no one has to do any work. If the newspaper used webcomics, then the page would have to be worked on by someone every day, and then they couldn’t continue to leave at 2:00.

Of course, the other side of this is that it used to be that the only way to make a comic strip earn you a living was to be syndicated. You could draw a comic strip for your local paper, but one paper doesn’t make a wage out of one comic strip. The new thing is webcomics, where you have to be your own syndicate and sell anything and everything you can- T-shirts, hats, books, comics, sketches, originals, and of course, advertising- in order to make a fraction of what the syndicates used to be able to do for you. Stinky, for most would-be cartoonists, but it is an option. It’s a whole new business to be in.

There you have it. If you’re an old-guard syndicated cartoonist, it’s the beginning of the end. If you’re a young cartoonist who has time and energy to float a webcomic and work it like a business, it’s the beginning of the beginning.

And that brings me, in a hugely roundabout fashion, to my point:

Hubris has another ad on the site. There are some Google ads which pay a tiny bit every so often, and a Foxy Bingo ad which will stay up for at least a year per agreement, and now I have a Project Wonderful ad. It’s over there on the right hand side just below the Hubris Book Ad. Right now, the bidding is young and tiny, but if you see anything keen on there you’d like to read, by all means, click that thang and check it out. The more click-throughs there are from Hubris, the better reputation I get for being a good adspace to run in, and the revenue goes up by tiny bits.

And there you go. The business of Hubris.

Also, I’m about to add stuff onto the Outdoor Galore Store Zazzle page, just in time for your Christmas shoppin’.

Well, I’m really new to this book thing. But here I am flogging another book. I just got my big box of them and sat down to look through the printed version. I like it. I’ve been doing The Buckets comic strip for a long while, with a few disappointing outcomes over publishing a new Buckets book. After this last time, I figured I needed a book no matter what, and asked John Lotshaw with Moonbase Press to set it up for me. He did, and now I know what everyone in my family and group of friends are getting for Christmas. If you have family and friends, I encourage you to consider The Exhausted Parents Guide To Why Your Life Is Normal.

I went back through six years of Buckets strips, reading each one. The ones that made me laugh out loud were used inthis book. So that’s what you’re getting: distilled Buckets O’ Funny. Concentrated Humor in a neat package. Remember to get extras, ’cause you’re gonna want to cut one of them up to put your favorite cartoons on the fridge and on your office door. See? That’s me being helpful. Christmas and birthdays, anniversaries, baby showers, Hannukah, Eid, Festivus, Agnostica, Solstice, New Year, Black Friday… I honestly do not wish to interfere with your right to give and receive celebratory gifts in your own freely-chosen fashion, within the bounds of your country’s attempts to legally restrict any antisocial craziness going on. I’m just sellin’books here.Enjoy.

Remember books? I sure do. Three of my studio walls are windows- almost nothing but windows, and so there’s some issue about where I would put the hundreds of books (mostly about cartooning or cartoons). Eventually, I put up a shelf that runs all around the three walls just above the windows. I had to reinforce the anchors and eventually just had to add braces all down the shelves because of the weight. Books are good for weight.

Kindle, nook and iPad are good for weight but in the opposite sense. A lightweight Kindle is a good thing that bespeaks of quality. A lightweight book- not so much. It bespeaks cheap paper or brevity or not-enough-for-your-money.

Then there’s these here books that have cartoons in them. Someday, you’ll only get The Buckets and Hubris in your electronic media, and trees everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief. Until then, though, you can get the heft and fun of owning, in the real world, a book full of cartoons. You can order The Buckets HERE and Hubris HERE.

And I apologize for slappin’ you with an ad for books here where I occasionally try to entertain you with photos of intrepidness or foolishness or both. On the other hand, you need another book or two while they still exist.

Okay, Jeff has some amazing stuff for me to post here, and I thought I had it ready to load up while I was out of town, but here we are without it and I’m going to delay it a day or so ’cause I have to honk on about my visit to The Festival Of Cartoon Art. I saw some of you guys there, and met some cartoonists that I hadn’t before, and saw some old friends, and some NCS peers with whom I shared a few stages. It was great. Here are some pictures for you:

The view out of my hotel window. Just right of center, you can make out a couple of museums- one of which hosted most of the Festival. The whole area used to be automobile manufacturing.

Books by the guests, available at the museum bookstore.

Rick Stromoski (Soup To Nutz) reviews my book. He's in charge of the National Cartoonist Society Foundation. They graciously helped out the Festival. It's what they're tasked with and they do a fine job, Rick especially.

Well, Good John Lotshaw at Moonbase Press has set up the first iteration of the first Hubris book ‘I Meant To Do That’.

Click HERE to peruse and perhaps purchase the product. (the Preview feature is a little wonky when I use it. I have to scroll through all the pages as blanks once, then it loads the book contents. weird.)

It makes a grand gift to those Luddites and other friends and family who do not share your penchant for coming to this website and enjoying Hubris as a vibrant digital experience.

It also serves as something you can sit with in small rooms with tile floors and running water- you know, where having your computer is nice, but unwieldy.

We’ll eventually do a printing of copies I can carry around to shows like the Kenosha Festival of Cartooning, and conventions, and stuff like that. Those, and any copies that you purchase at Lulu then bring to me for the purpose, will be autographed and sketched in and all.

SOLD! The Buckets comic strips that were donated to the Team Cul De Sac Book to raise money for Parkinson’s disease did pretty well in the auction: $310.70! Less than some entries but more than most. The Bill Watterson painting of Petey went for over $13,000. Yow. Anyhow, if you were one of the bidders, many thanks goes to you. The auction raised over $50,000 to go toward research to end Parkinson’s Disease. You guys did good.

Here is a link for you. It’s to a book full of cartoons and cartoon paintings and funny pictures and everything all based around the comic strip Cul De Sac by Richard Thompson. You see, Richard has Parkinson’s Disease. Yes, the same thing that Michael J. Fox has. So this book compiles a lot of work done by scads o’ cartoonists all so that this book could be made and the proceeds of its sale go to support research into beating Parkinson’s Disease. And of course, I’ve got a page in there (You could bid on it here. That money goes to research too. Very thorough, aren’t they?) so this isn’t some altruistic “rah-rah for cartooning” thing. No, I want you to rush out to buy this book so that you can see what I drew. That’s the whole reason I’m involved. Ego. Nothing to do with battling disease for me.

Anyhow, the cartoons I did have a trebuchet in them. Like a catapult. And it throws ice machines. Get the book.

This is the March 1999 cartoon I did for The Bench Jeweler, a trade newspaper published by a large jewelry wholesaler (Fargotstein’s & Sons- Great people). I don’t remember how often I did these cartoons. It may have been monthly, bi-monthly or even quarterly or even all three, depending on the year. but I started doing them before I had a computer in the studio and they ended in, I think, 2000. I still very occasionally have someone track me down to ask if there was ever a book or anything. I doubt there were ever enough cartoons to do a whole book- maybe fifty exist. Because they were done so infrequently and over such a long period and drawn at different sizes, the art style changes a bit. I may try to dig up one of the earlier originals (they were done on 22 inch bristol paper) and scan one in to color and include here one day. That’d be cool. This one was drawn, scanned, and turned into vector art for coloring: